From the streets to the suburbs, hip-hop has become the [I]lingua franca[/I] of pure rootless rage. That much of gangsta rap was a cynical attempt to vicariously offer ‘street’ thrills to suburbia was a troubling element of hip-hop in the ’90s. That this has led to a new generation of rap-inflected white music is a cross we all have to bear in the early-2000s.
This is where we find southern California’s [a]Crazy Town[/a], who in line with the blueprint developed by [a]Rage Against The Machine[/a] and [a]Limp Bizkit[/a], have plastered a hip-hop lacquer over the kind of rudimentary metal sludge that has been pacifying suburban slobs since the early-’70s. Their additional innovation is to stir Cure-styled phased basslines into the existing cultural soup. Goth-hop then, folks. It had to happen.
However, Crazy Town‘s stylistic development ends abruptly there; ‘The Gift Of Game’ is another episode of rhetorical underkill with twin rappers Epic and Shifty endlessly big-upping themselves against a backdrop of senseless sex and casual violence. Incapable of expressing any emotion beyond psychosis, this is a tasteless cavalcade of bullying beats and psychological underdevelopment from beginning to end.
Inevitably, you’re going to love it.